Between 17 and 28 October 2016, Harley Weir photographed inside the migrant and refugee camps of Calais, working in the days immediately before and during the clearance of that provisional settlement. The pictures gathered in Homes attend to rooms, shelters and improvised interiors — the domestic arrangements people made and remade while living under the threat of removal. Rather than documenting the camp as a single humanitarian subject, Weir stays close to the private spaces within it, where a curtain, a bed, a wall covering or a kept object registers both ingenuity and the wish to live ordinarily.

The book was first issued by Loose Joints in November 2016 to raise awareness and funds during the camp’s dismantling and the relocation of its residents; that run sold quickly and supported La Cimade. A second edition followed in September 2018, timed to a large-scale presentation at Brighton Photo Biennial, with three images not previously published. Sarah Chaplin Espenon edited the volume, which Loose Joints also designed and published as a stapled book with a silkscreened and foil-embossed cover, 64 pages and 42 colour plates.

Weir came to this subject with an established practice of intimate personal and editorial work, and the closeness of her approach is what distinguishes Homes from more panoramic records of displacement. Her attention falls on what people build and keep when almost nothing is secure — an argument made through particular rooms rather than through general statement.

For a collector, the book holds its place on several counts: the urgency of its making, the speed of its first reception, and the fact that the second edition appeared while conditions in Calais remained precarious, renewing both the work’s visibility and its charitable purpose. Its compact scale and considered production suit a body of photographs whose power lies in proximity rather than spectacle.